Recently, development of antitank weapons, such as antitank missiles, rockets, antitank guns and the like, derives a remarkable enhancement of penetrabilities. Especially, as the antitank missile has rapidly been developed, it has a remarkably enhanced penetrability. Also, for a guided antitank missile, tendency is toward development from the conventional line-of-sight type to the fire-and-forget type by virtue of mounting an independent seeker.
As such, an active protection (defense) system, which can protect the ground weapon system from the threatening objects, is proposed. The active protection system is a field, which has been intensively researched and developed behind closed doors in various countries since the early 1990s for passengers survival rode in the ground weapon system. The active protection system is divided into soft-kill and hard-kill according to a mechanism of defending against a detected/tracked threatening object.
The soft-kill mechanism is to detect/track an approach of a threatening object at a long distance in advance so as to determine in a fast time whether or not to be threatened. Afterwards, a smoke shell is rapidly fired in the approaching direction of the threatening object to disable observation/aiming and self-guiding function of the threatening object, and simultaneously a tank may be fast moved into the smoke to protect the passengers' survival.
On the contrary, the hard-kill mechanism is to neutralize a threatening object directly by firing a counter-shell toward the threatening object.
According to the trend of the recent technology development, probability of avoiding the threatening object by the soft-kill is decreasing more and more.
Hence, a radar apparatus, which can be applied to the hard-kill, and has distinctiveness in the aspect of being mounted within a limited space like the ground weapon system and can rapidly/precisely detect and tract a variety of high speed targets approaching at a close range, may be considered.